1. Technical Field
The invention relates generally to the Internet communication technology. More particularly, the invention relates to a system and method for delivering and rendering scalable Web pages.
2. Background of the Invention
Authors of World Wide Web (WWW) documents all share a common and frustrating problem: the viewers of their documents have highly diverse viewing environments—especially with regard to the physical dimensions of the window a document is displayed in. This is problematic, especially if authors desire to produce documents with specific layout requirements. Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), the document format for WWW, provides very little in the way of scalable page elements. Many elements, text in particular, are fixed at specific sizes. When viewed on browsers with a large display resolution, text appears quite small when compared to displays with low resolution. Furthermore, even those elements that support some form of scaling are difficult to control because of the rudimentary manner in which the scaling support is provided. All this makes development of a consistent layout for WWW documents rather difficult.
One way for a document author to combat this problem is through the use of dynamic scripting languages such as JavaScript. These languages provide a way to detect information about a viewer's environment and modify the document accordingly. Unfortunately, the native document object code (DOM) provided by these languages is rather problematic. In the case of Netscape Navigator 4, not all of the page elements are accessible. Many elements are “write-only” or “read-only”, making it impossible to use the native structure as a reliable place to store document information.
Conversely, Internet Explorer (4 & 5) has a DOM that can be, at times, overly complex, making it difficult to constrain the degree to which a document should be modified.
Adding to the WWW author's problem is the fact that the DOMs used by Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer are dramatically different in nature. Supporting both browsers requires the development of different scripts that can interact with the individual DOMs.
What is desired is to develop a browser independent document data structure which enable page authors to freely access and modify all relevant aspects of the document without having to worry about limitations of the browser DOMs.